Julian Birkinshaw
Professor of Strategic and International Management of London Business School
Julian Birkinshaw is Professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School. He is co-Founder and Research Director of the Management Lab (MLab).
He has PhD and MBA degrees in Business from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Durham. He has worked at the University of Toronto, the Stockholm School of Economics, Price Waterhouse and ICI.
Julian’s main area of expertise is in the strategy and management of large multinational corporations, and on such specific issues as corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, subsidiary-headquarters relationship, knowledge management, network organisations, and global customer management.
Julian's most recent book Reinventing Management: Making Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done, was published in March 2010. He is also the author Giant Steps in Management (2007), Inventuring: Why Big Companies Must Think Small (2003), Leadership the Sven-Goran Eriksson Way (2002), and Entrepreneurship in the Global Firm (2001), and over fifty articles in such journals as Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review.
In 1998 the leading British management magazine Management Today profiled Julian as one of six of the “Next Generation of Management Gurus”. He is regularly quoted in international media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times and speaks regularly at business conferences.
Blog Posts by Julian Birkinshaw
Management Ideology: The Last Bastion of American Hegemony
Here is a tricky question: How many living management gurus can you name who did not learn their trade in North America? I have asked many colleagues this question, and it's pretty hard to come up with a good list. For example, consider the individuals in last year's "Thinkers 50" ranking list. By my reckoning, there are only seven who make the cut: Richard Branson (Virgin), Kris Gopalakrishnan (Infosys), Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale (Stockholm School of Economics), Lynda Gratton, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones (London Business School).
Does this matter? I think it does.
The Cure for Corporate Inertia
We all know that big, established companies struggle to respond to "disruptive" change. Blockbuster, HMV, Nokia, and Yahoo! are all current examples of companies that are struggling with this problem--they are trying to adapt, but are being held back by powerful and often invisible inertial forces.
A recent example of corporate inertia really struck home, and got me thinking about the key role management processes play in preventing change.
Is your intranet fit for the future?
What would it look like if the rapidly-evolving social world of Web 2.0 collided with the sterile and static corporate Intranet? What would happen if information flowed from the outside in, instead of inside out?
Those are the questions at the heart of an interesting experiment unfolding at global consulting firm Capgemini.
Customer Engagement is Employee Engagement (and vice versa)
Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Simon Caulkin.
Employee engagement is, as they say, a no-brainer. There are stacks of literature showing that companies with committed employees who feel strongly about their organization do better financially than those with indifferent employees. In many cases, too, improvement is actually quite easy to achieve.
Large numbers of employees work in silos, with deep functional expertise but no line of sight to the person ultimately buying their product. Yet it turns out that exposure to customers can be a powerful source of insight and motivation.
